“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. Lysergic acid diethylamide-25. A “trip” can last for five to eight hours, or even longer. But there isn’t any one psychedelic experience for all, either in terms of time or content — the whole thing is too intensely personal. Note, though, that Seth’s statements here refer only to LSD, used under certain conditions. There are other chemical hallucinogens, for example, that are not mentioned above.

(9:12. Pause.) The nature of your personal beliefs in a large measure directs the kinds of emotions you will have at any given time. You will feel aggressive, happy, despairing, or determined according to events that happen to you, your beliefs about yourself in relation to them, and your ideas of who and what you are. You will not understand your emotions unless you know your beliefs. It will seem to you that you feel aggressive or upset without reason, or that your feelings sweep down upon you without cause if you do not learn to listen to the beliefs within your own conscious mind, for they generate their own emotions.

First be aware of the reality of your feelings. As you become more aware of your beliefs over a period of time, you will see how they bring forth certain feelings automatically. A man who is sure of himself is not angry at every slight done him, nor does he carry grudges. A man who fears for his own worth, however, is furious under such conditions. The free flow of your emotions will always lead you back to your conscious beliefs if you do not impede them.

(During break, I wondered aloud if she might have selected the book because she intuitively knew Seth was going to discuss its kind tonight — or did Seth use the incident, once it transpired, to make his points in a fresh way? Jane didn’t know, adding that she hadn’t “looked at the book in four or five years.” Nor had I. Yet I remembered how we’d believed in it so implicitly at the time of purchase….

If you have been told, again, that the spirit is good, in fact perfect, and that you must then be perfect in all of your ways, while at the same time you believe in the imperfection of the body, you will always be in conflict with yourself.

Birth is an aggressive action — the thrust outward with great impetus of a self from within a body into a new environment. Any creative idea is aggressive. Violence is not aggressive. It is instead a passive surrender to emotion which is not understood or evaluated, only feared, and at the same time sought.

Let us take a very simple example involving a kind and good man in a fairly ordinary environment within your society. (Pause.) He has been taught that it is manly to be aggressive, but he believes that this means fighting. As an adult, he frowns upon fighting. He cannot hit his boss, though he may want to. At the same time his church may tell him to turn the other cheek when he is upset, and to be kind, gentle and understanding.

When a man or a woman always smiles at you, the smile can be like a mask. You do not know whether or not you are communicating with such a person. The sound of the voice, again, follows its own patterns, and natural aggression should and will color it at times.

(Pause.) Sometimes you think of suicide as ignominious and passive, but of war as aggressive and powerful. Both are equally the result of passivity and distorted aggression, and of natural pathways of communication not used or understood. You think of flowers in terms of gentleness, beauty and “goodness,” and yet every time a new bud opens there is a great thrust of joyful aggression that is hardly passive, and a daring and courage that reaches actively outward. Without aggression your body would be denied its growth, the cells within it caught in inertia. Aggressiveness is at the base of the magnificent bursting of creativity.

Now: That is the end of dictation, and the end of our session. If you want something on probabilities I will give it to you at another time, and it will be, though briefly, discussed along with some material on reincarnation in this book.

Then I will give a progress report at a later time.

(11:40 p.m. Jane yawned again and again. “I feel exhausted — and yet I’m charged with energy at the same time,” she said. The paper Seth had referred to concerned some of her own work with beliefs. My writing hand ached.)